Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Connect to the internet from Linux through a Windows Mobile phone

Maybe with *buntu it's stupid easy, but as far as my experience goes, they probably tried to make it easy but it fails catastrophically in 50% of the cases. This is how to connect you linux box to the internet using the "Share connection" funcion of many phones, directly from the command line, so it should work in any linux distro, even in *buntu! Of course, some commands must be run as root, so be warned that if you type "rm -rf /" by mistake, I accept no responsability for your (incredibly dumb) actions.

Via USB: plug the phone to the computer, select "USB" as the PC connection in the application, press conect on the phone screen and type "dhcpcd eth1" in the console. If the browser gets stuck in a "Waiting for [domain]" step, try "ifconfig eth1 mtu 1394" and the reload the website again.Good to go? Then I'm glad.Something failed? Try: modprobing rdnis_host, using dhclient instead of dhcpcd or trying a different interface. To find out which one is the correct one just do a "ifconfig -a" before and after pressing connect on the phone screen. Or try with different MTU values, of course for the USB network interface.If it still doesn't work, something definitely sucks: you with linux, me as a teacher or life. I'm sorry either way.

Via Bluetooth: ok, pay attention because this one is not as straightforward as the USB one. Of course you need BT working in your computer, so if you don't, go read some howto, install bluez utils and keep reading.- First select "Bluetooth PAN" as the PC connection on the phone screen and press connect.Now, if you haven't used bluetooth between you linux box and your phone before, you have to introduce them to each other. If you have, it'll be enough to do the pand and dhcp steps.- Ok, let's start with the phone. In the application's menu, go to BT config and under "Mode" make sure your phone is "discoverable" by other devices.- Now with the computer. First, activate the BT device, either by a physical switch or any other specific method your hardware manufacturer happened to use.- After your BT light is on and shining, find your phone by typing "hcitool scan". Among all kind of crap, including "hello kitty" depending on your location, you should see your phone. And its MAC address. So remember it. Or copy it to paste it in the next step if you are not a geek.- Next step: connect to the phone. Type "pand -c MAC_ADDRESS". If it's the first time, your phone will ask you if you really want him to talk to this stranger. Now pay attention: on your computer, open a new console and run "bluez-simple-agent" and on your phone answer yes. You will be prompted a code on both. Enter the same code in both. Press enter/ok on both. You can close the new console on the computer now and on the phone, the messages that will pop up.- Ok, so the computer and the phone are connected now, or at least they should be. Confirm it by looking for "Connected" on the phone and doing a "hcitool con" on the PC. You should also have a new network device, bnep0 on the linux box.- Last step, similar as with the USB process: "dhcpcd bnep0", or your dhcp client of choice for that matter. You shouln't need to modify the MTU here.

If you have some problem you can leave a comment and we'll figure out what's sucking in that moment :)